


Tomorrow There'll Be More Of Us

by pandoradeloeste



Category: The Bright Sessions (Podcast), The College Tapes (Podcast)
Genre: Adam loves Yale and sometimes love means dunking on your racist anti-Semitic forebears, Adam’s radio show, Gen, hashtag ENGAGEMENT, period racism and anti-Semitism, wild speculation about the mythology club
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-10
Updated: 2021-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-16 14:09:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29951139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pandoradeloeste/pseuds/pandoradeloeste
Summary: Sometimes Adam uses his radio show to vaguebook about his identity crisis. And sometimes he uses it to deliver monologues about Yale’s Jewish quota and atypicals from the 1940s.
Kudos: 7





	Tomorrow There'll Be More Of Us

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Robin_in_a_hoodie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Robin_in_a_hoodie/gifts).



> Happy birthday Robin!

[[Evil Gal Blues](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4V49WJ0ibCQ) fades out]

I know what you’re thinking. “Adam, why have you been playing jazz from the forties for the past fifteen minutes? Where’s the vintage early 2000s emo kid nostalgia I’m used to? Where’s the Panic and MCR?” Don’t worry, there’s a method to my madness. All will be explained.

How are we doing, listeners? How are midterms going? Mine are, well, they’re better than last semester, but that’s a low bar. Even since the. . .the Halloween frat party that got out of hand in Russell Library, I’ve had to find a new study spot. My roommate is pre-law and she’s been trying to sell me on the law library, and it’s. . .okay. Not as good as Russell, but at least there’s some nice quiet carrels. I’ve been spending a lot of time there this week, trying to finish my fucking senior essay before Passover starts, and staring at portraits of old law professors more than I normally would. One in particular, actually: Professor Tobias Sitzer.

You know, I take it for granted that I can go anywhere on campus and join any club I want. Or that I was able to get into Yale in the first place. Don’t get me wrong, I worked my ass off in high school to get my GPA high enough for the admissions department to even _look_ at me. But nobody tried to figure out how Jewish I was before deciding to admit me. That’s a disturbingly new development.

And by the way, I want to be clear: Yale has been absolute shit to _everyone_ who wasn’t a straight cis white Christian man. I’m focusing on the Jewish quotas right now because if I got into their supposedly “race blind” admissions criteria that led to only 5 black students out of a class of 1,000 in 1960, or the fact that Yale only became fully coed in 1969, we’d be here all night, and I only have another fifteen minutes before Jason kicks me out of the studio. I’ll save that rant for another night. It’s a doozy, trust me, and it starts where the Jewish quotas started: with white male fragility.

So the year is 1923. World War I ended five years ago. Immigration from Europe into the US has been ramping up for about fifty years due to a wave of pogroms in the Russian Empire and bad economic conditions in Europe leading into World War I. Like all immigrants since the dawn of time, they came because they had nowhere else to go and they wanted a better life for their kids. And unfortunately, as in all countries that become magnets for immigrants since the dawn of time, rich motherfuckers in the US were happy to use them for cheap labor, and then turn around and stoke nativism and xenophobia among American workers who were worried about immigrants stealing their jobs. If that sounds familiar, congratulations, you’ve been paying attention to the debates about immigration from Mexico and Central America. Racists literally have not learned any new moves since the 1800s.

Rich and middle class WASPs saw first- and second-generation immigrants thriving, and buying houses in their neighborhoods, and joining their social clubs, and sending their kids to. . .whatever turn of the century parents sent their kids to instead of soccer practice and ballet, and they _lost their fucking minds._ There’s a reason the KKK and social Darwinism and eugenics became popular again in the 20s. It’s also the reason 1921 saw one of the most restrictive immigration bills we’d seen so far.

Old-money WASPs saw immigrant families sending their kids to the same rich prep schools and colleges they’d been sending _their_ kids to, and lost _their_ fucking minds. Here’s where we need to talk about Harvard for a minute - I know, I know, insert obligatory booing and hissing here, and you’re not entirely wrong. The president of Harvard spent a few years convincing everyone that Jewish immigrant and first-generation kids were fucking up the grade curve and being weird and clique-ish - which is _rich_ when most student groups and eating clubs had explicit policies banning Jews. But here’s the thing: Harvard may have said the quiet part out loud, but Yale didn’t bother putting it to a vote or talking about it, they just went ahead and changed their admissions policies and capped Jewish enrollment at 10%.

This isn’t a bulletin board-and-string conspiracy theory, by the way, we have _actual fucking proof_ archived _at Yale_. There are letters in Sterling Library between the dean of admissions and the dean of Yale calling the number of Jews at Yale a problem and outlining how they were going to cut down the number of Jewish admissions. Ask me nicely and I’ll get you the call numbers for the letters - actually, scratch that, _tweet_ at me nicely. CJ’s always trying to get us to interact with people on Twitter, so there you go, CJ. Hashtag _engagement_.

Anyway. 1923 is when Yale started limiting their class sizes and using some highly subjective ideas about “character” and “merit” to pick incoming freshmen, ideas that we’re still dealing with today. All those reports about how the SATs and ACTs skew heavily in favor of rich white kids? That’s a feature, not a bug. They were designed to weed out “undesirable” students - Jews originally, but today they’re still discriminating against students of color. Remember how we all had to put together portfolios of extracurriculars and recommendation letters and interviews for all our college applications? The reason admissions criteria are so weird and subjective is to give them the leeway to exclude anyone they don’t want in their lily-white WASPy enclave.

Here’s how bad it was: Princeton almost rejected Richard Feynman because they were afraid he might be too obviously Jewish. Let that sink in for a minute. _Richard Feynman._ The guy who went on to revolutionize quantum electrodynamics and make physics comprehensible to fuzzies like me. Princeton almost passed him over because they thought his nose was a little too big.

Ask any Jew who had at least one family member in the US who went to college between 1920 and 1960 - not just at Yale, _everywhere,_ because once the Big Three introduced quotas everyone else got on the bandwagon - and they probably have a story about having to downplay their Judaism, or pretend to be less observant than they really were, or having to change career paths when the school they’d been training to get into had already let in too many Jews and rejected them out of hand. My grandfather was supposed to go into engineering but the university was like “sorry, we’re at our limit for Jews this year, try biology instead”. And that’s how my dad’s family ended up with several generations of doctors instead of engineers.

While Princeton was debating whether a future Manhattan Project physicist looked goyische enough to get in, our future law professor Tobias Sitzer was wrapping up his freshman year at Erasmus Hall in Brooklyn. His parents, Friederich and Regina Sitzer, were immigrants from. . .somewhere in Eastern Germany, the manifests from Ellis Island around that time are a kind of a mess. Wherever it was, it had a decent Yiddish-speaking community, because Tobias grew up speaking Yiddish at home. His parents worked in the garment industry and Tobias was being groomed to join the new family business after high school, when an English teacher convinced him to apply to college. Friederich and Regina were a little skeptical at first, but when they saw Tobias’s classmates and friends from the neighborhood being drafted into the war, they got on board pretty quickly.

By the 1940s incoming classes were limited to about 850 students, give or take, and the admission rate was around 50% across the board. But since Jewish enrollment was capped at 10%, Jewish applicants were four times more likely than Christian applicants to get rejected. Tobias must have impressed the hell out of the admissions board to get one of the 80-ish slots available for Jewish students in 1943. Or maybe he was just incredibly lucky.

Tobias started off as an English major, but he switched to pre-law in his junior year, at the urging of associate professor Robert Moritz, who is _another_ interesting figure I should talk about at some point. Maybe later, after my senior essay is done, I’ll do that deep dive on queer faculty throughout Yale’s history and I can talk about Professor Moritz. Anyway, Moritz became Tobias’s advisor for the next two years and got him to join the Mythology Club.

Social clubs back then were starting to drop their anti. . . _anyone_ -who-wasn’t-a-WASPy-rich-kid stance. Most of them limited themselves to a token Catholic or Jewish student. The one exception was the Mythology Club. As far as I can tell, at the time the Mythology Club wasn’t really about mythology, any more than Skull and Bones has anything to do with anatomy. It was just a vaguely mystical-sounding name at a time when that sort of thing was popular. As I understand it, the astronomy and history majors have mostly taken over the Mythology Club by now. _Mostly._ But back in 1945, when Tobias joined, it was a social club like any other. Again, _mostly_.

I haven’t been able to find a lot of sources on the Mythology Club. The only primary sources we have left are some yearbooks in Russell Library, and those are still behind tarps and caution tape because of the Halloween frat party fuckery. Friends of mine who have done some. . . _additional research_. . .say they’ve found sources claiming that the Mythology Club is almost as old as Yale itself and it’s one of the _vanishingly_ rare student clubs that accepted women, Jews, students of color, poor students, queer students. . .everyone that the other clubs wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. Alice Rufie Jordan, the first woman to study law at Yale? Member of the Mythology Club. Edward Bouchet, one of the first black students? Also a member. Say what you want about the club - and oh boy, a _lot_ can be said, and none of it belongs on the air - but their admission policy was pretty egalitarian. Obscure, but at least they didn’t care about your gender or your race.

Tobias graduated pre-law with honors, went to Fordham for law school, and practiced for a few years in New York before coming back to Yale as an assistant professor in 1955. I feel like this happens to a lot of the lawyers I know: they go to law school, pass the bar, and then realize they actually hate practicing law. Something _certain people_ should maybe consider before dropping too much money on law school. [pointed throat clearing] 

Assistant Professor Sitzer carried on teaching law and sociology classes and doing his best to support the Jewish students he came across, the way Professor Moritz supported _him_ 10 years ago. He’s listed on the charter for the Mythology Club as a faculty advisor, along with. . .you know what, fuck the other guy. He’s a manipulative dick and he doesn’t deserve the airtime. I’ll call him Vold - no, not Voldemort, he doesn’t get a badass villain name. Daffy Duck. Let’s go with that. Daffy Duck notwithstanding, the Mythology Club made a home for Tobias when he was a student, and it looks like he did his best to carry on that tradition as faculty advisor.

In May 1961, a newly tenured _Professor_ Sitzer was approached by the chaplain, Reverend Coffin, and the director of Yale’s Hillel, Rabbi Israel, to sign a letter of support for getting rid of the quotas. The rabbi had done some investigating of his own and found out about the policy of automatically rejecting as many Jewish students as they could get away with. At this point the civil rights movement was starting to gain traction, and even at a conservative place like Yale, everyone agreed equal access to education was a slam-dunk.

Or at least it should have been. President Griswold turned out to be depressingly resistant to the idea. I’ve been over the notes for that meeting a dozen times, and all I can guess is that there was a big chunk of endowment money at stake. Tobias, Rabbi Israel, and Reverend Coffin picked up support from other staff and students over the next ten months. The notes on those meetings are sketchy too, but I get the sense that they were increasingly tense. It’s not clear how long that standoff would have gone, but after ten months some members of the Mythology Club joined in. 

There aren’t _any_ notes from that meeting. All we know is that Griswold walked into a meeting with Tobias, a few other students and alumni connected to the Mythology Club, and Bla - Daffy Duck. The meeting lasted less than ten minutes, and he walked out looking like he’d seen a ghost, and immediately sent a memo to the admissions department asking them to drop the quota. I have some ideas about what happened at that meeting, mainly because Daffy Duck was there, and the Guild of Yale Bellringers got some complaints about the bells being played at the wrong hour. Again. All I know for certain is that it wasn’t. . .a _typical_ meeting. 

And I honestly don’t know how to feel about that. I can’t argue with the end result - hell, I wouldn’t even be here at Yale to argue about it if they hadn’t. . .done whatever they did. That quota was hot anti-Semitic garbage and it needed to die. But I’d like to think that the ends don’t always justify the means, and if Daffy Duck was in the meeting, the means. . .might. . .also have been hot garbage.

[cough] Anyway. Like I said, I’m benefiting from whatever Tobias and Daffy Duck said, or did, or whatever. Doubly, even, since Tobias and some other members of the Mythology Club had a meeting with President Brewster in 1969 before he revised their admissions policies again, this time to let in more students of color. Do I have a leg to stand on if I’m uncomfortable with how they did it? Philosophy majors, tweet at me and let me know. Give me a moral crisis and make CJ’s day at the same time.

_Aaand_ speaking of CJ, she’s making faces at me through the window because my time is almost up. I was hoping I could talk about something other than anti-Semitism and the dismantling thereof, because Professor Sitzer did a lot more than just fight his own oppression, but as usual I rambled too long. I’ll have to come back to him during that deep dive on queer faculty I mentioned earlier.

Thanks for indulging yet another of my epically long rants, listeners. Special thanks to my friends who stumbled onto Professor Sitzer during. . .some completely unrelated research, and to Professor Jason Beck for being willing to talk about law school politics with me. A very special “fuck you” to the elitist bigots who thought that some people were more worthy of basic fucking humanity than others because of an accident of birth - and Daffy Duck, wherever you are, this includes you.

All right, time for me to hand the mic over to Jason and go meet up with my boyfriend before we drive back to Boston for Passover. Chag sameach to the people celebrating tomorrow. And to everyone, especially people who’ve been told they’re too much for Yale, or not enough, in one way or another, I see you. Ace those midterms, and keep being the founders’ worst nightmares. Signing off.

[[Bei Mir Bist Du Schön](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcLA0m7P7gM) plays]

**Author's Note:**

> Shout out to [write_away](https://archiveofourown.org/users/write_away/pseuds/write_away) for giving us CJ the long-suffering programming director.
> 
> I have learned far too much about mid-20th century anti-Semitism/racism and discriminatory admissions practices, and now I kind of want to burn down all of academia. If you’d care to take up a pitchfork or a torch and join me, here’s some of the sources I looked at (not counting Wikipedia rabbit holes and googling random shit like “when did WWI end” and “wtf is quantum electrodynamics”):
> 
> ["Who Was Shut Out?: Immigration Quotas, 1925–1927".](http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5078) _History Matters._ George Mason University. Retrieved January 3, 2012.
> 
> Johnson, Dirk. [“Yale’s Limit on Jewish Enrollment Lasted Until Early 1960s, Book Says.”](https://www.nytimes.com/1986/03/04/nyregion/yale-s-limit-on-jewish-enrollment-lasted-until-early-1960-s-book-says.html) _New York Times,_ 4 March 1986, p. B1
> 
> Karabel, Jerome. _The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton._ Houghton Mifflin, 2005.
> 
> Karabel, Jerome. [“How Affirmative Action Took Hold At Harvard, Yale, and Princeton”.](https://sites.miis.edu/comparativeeducation/files/2013/01/Affirmative-action-at-Harvard-Yale-Princeton.pdf) _The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education,_ no. 48, 2005, pp. 58-77.
> 
> Oren, Dan. [“Joining the Club: A History Of Jews And Yale”.](https://www.loc.gov/item/webcast-8732/) Library of Congress, 6 May 2019, Washington, DC.


End file.
